 "Photo: dreamcrowd.com")
You are sitting in a bathtub. Nothing is particularly out of the ordinary. You're just bathing. Suddenly, there's an uninvited guest in the tub with you -- a clown! As the foolish phantasm hinders your bathing, you think to yourself: is this a dream?
Well folks, perhaps it is. However, there is also a small chance that you were the actor who had the formidable task of bathing with a clown in a recent commercial for Dreamcrowd, a Web site created and designed by LMU graduate student Ruben Dua and UCLA student Ricky Liunarto.
The site combines the wonders afforded by Wikipedia and Facebook with the stuff that composes dreams.
"The site was actually created by accident," joked Dua. "Ricky and I set out to make a democratized search engine, but we realized that everyone around us was already doing that." That's when Dua realized, "everyone dreams, and most people remember their dreams." And, as any other MBA will tell you, if most people are doing something, you should consider making a Web site about it.
The foremost important feature of Dreamcrowd is its utilization of aspects from profile-based Web sites like Facebook and MySpace. Users can post their dreams in the site's "dreamlogs" for the public to comment on and interpret.
What about those embarrassing dreams in which a little baby bench presses twice as much as you, or in which a nun sucker-punches you in the face? Talk about embarrassing!
Luckily, Dreamcrowd allows you to categorize certain dreams as private, so that they are only shared with certain users.
Perhaps the most useful piece of Dreamcrowd's psychoanalytic tools is its innovative "dreamopedia." If you have ever tried to search for the meanings of your dreams online, you've inevitably discovered a plethora of "dream dictionary" Web sites containing brief stabs, for example, of what it means to fall off of something in your dream. These sites, however, are often riddled with advertisements, are incomplete or are simply way off base.
The aptly named dreamopedia feature makes use of the democratized search engine concept, culminating in the dream-knowledge of all Dreamcrowd dreamers. Additionally, since dreamlogs come equipped with a tagging feature, a submitted dream is automatically analyzed using the dreamopedia.
Is it a dream come true? Most definitely.
Despite still being in the Beta stage, Dreamcrowd already has a few thousand registered users. Dreamcrowd's bathtub/clown commercial, hosted by Metacafe, has also attracted nearly 20,000 views with its tactful tags, "naked," "nude" and "funny."
However, Dua wants to emphasize that Dreamcrowd is only the beginning for his crew. Accordingly, the dream-based community is actually the first in a series of sites to be designed and programmed by Dua's new technological development firm, Crowdspin. Supposedly, a new site is rumored to be emerging from the Crowdspin lab in the next few weeks, one that involves LMU undergrad Patrick Falls.
Until then, Dreamcrowd is growing every day, and registration is absolutely free. So keep your own dream journal if you must, but at least back it up on the Web where real dreams are made.
